Sunday, October 26, 2014

§PLAYEDZest
Be a good samaritan and go to the church in this game. That part has quite a wonderful sermon, where as Emily Short writes, "The loaves and fishes weren’t multiplied because God miraculously violated the law of the conservation of mass, but that the people in the crowd were shamed or persuaded into donating their own food which they had formerly been selfishly reserving for themselves". As the priest in Zest says - "That instead of an audience, they had become a community". Let's top it off with a nice prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is discord, harmony; Where there is error, truth; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
§

Bernband (Tom van den Boogaart)
It fascinates me how lo-fi experiences such as this and Slave of God can immerse and mystify me so strongly. At the surface level, there doesn't seem very much to these experiences, yet just walking around there - no aim in sight, exploring stuff - can feel more compelling and exciting than exploring a town in a high-end RPG, say Wasteland 2. Well, for some time at least - I guess making larger areas with more substance is where it gets really tricky to sustain my attention. Immersion in these walking simulators (paradoxically?) probably has something to do with the lack of objectives, lack of "agency", lack of pressure put on me as a player to perform, lack of uncanny valleys, lack of too high expectations on what the game might be simulating and how finegrained the system is for that simulation. It thus probably has something to do with simulationfever. By painting in broad strokes, it leaves more to the imagination. This reminds me of Chris Bateman's Imaginary Games, and some ideas there: "The movie dictates almost everything about the accompanying game of make believe, and thus the movie is more intrusive in the viewer's game than for example a book, the authorial vision stronger. The props (things mandating specific imaginings in games of make-believe) do not leave much room for the imagination of the player, which explains why the experience of a movie can be quite unconvincing and non-immersive when the props are of poor quality." Yes indeed, and the psychological locks upon you may be as such that you deem the movie to be of bad quality ("at the surface it seems like nothing much, really"), to be cliched or stupid, and you could still be moved emotionally by it, or in this case, immersed.

§

NaissanceEis all about architecture and atmosphere. Shadows cast on white and grey. Well, not only - it is also about breathing, and running, and jumping. But without any context. Sort of. What do I know, I only played it for an hour and watched the last chapter on youtube. The soundscape is very unsettling and wonderful too. It's like an alien Blade Runner running around in the abstract love child of Tarkovsky and Kubrik.

I'm hoping when these darn walking simulators flood the VR-market people will become too seasick to jump around, and instead just opt for, well, walking. Or autojumping. Or something.

§

A City Sleeps
I've been a fan of Harmonix ever since FreQuency and Amplitude, and although their kickstarter video pitch was awesome, the game pitched seems to be the same game which was released almost ten years ago, only with new songs. This interests me as little as yet another Rockband, and the music video game genre in general lays dormant for me right now. But Harmonix seem to be trying some different stuff too, both in Chroma and A City Sleeps. Shmups are another genre which I've been a big fan of, but which I'm really not into these days, so the music game-shmup-breed that is A City Sleeps comes at me from a very specific angle. I didn't expect much, and after the initial hour I was very pleasantly surprised, only to be disappointed when venturing further. I've come to the conclusion that the shooting and scoring in the game isn't very deep. The potential was there to let the music guide your dodging, to let your secondary weapons be placed in different areas of the screen and let your dodging follow a natural rhythm since you'd want to be at specific places when the beat hits or whatnot, but I just couldn't find any good flow at all while playing. When the game was at its easiest it also felt the most relaxing and rewarding, graphics and music in unison with the cool backstory. But soon enough things started to get more difficult, and I quit because nothing made sense to me. It just didn't feel graceful. I thought I'd just play breeze through the game to get the really good writing and story out of the way, but realized that quite fast the game became too hard for me, like 3/5 difficulties in! Seems I'll be waiting for a playthrough to get the rest of the story. A real shame. Seems to me the universe they built up (and mostly allude to) for the game is a very interesting one, but I just can't progress much further due to sucking too much, which says a lot considering I've played these types of games a significant amount of time...

§

Devil's Dare
Sidescrolling beat em ups are awesome. And yet, where are the really good ones? Where are the Turtles in Time, Super Double Dragon and Final Fight of our era? Or Streets of Rage, or Three Dirty Dwarves, etc? I remember Alien Hominid made a splash, yet I didn't find it very appealing. Well, Devil's Dare plays a bit like Streets of Rage and feels very old-school, in the sense that movement is quite limited. Disappointing, but since there is the possiblity of co-op play for up to four players, I will definitely return to this when I have the friends available for it.

§

Laza Knitez!!
I played this back when it was a prototype in a homemade arcade cabinet, and it was as awesome then as it is now. Aw hell yeah. The roster of action-packed party games keeps growing. Towerfall, Nidhogg, Samurai Gunn, Laza Knitez, Starwhal...

§

Dragon Age 2
I started playing it! Suddenly I'm anticipating the third installment, because I realized I have a friend who will play it and it seems quite cozy to sit beside hir and watch hir play, even though I'm skeptic to the game and probably won't be seeing it through to the end. Maybe that will be the case with Dragon Age 2 - it all depends on the characters and the story...

Like so much horror, Silent Hill 2 is about the failure of things – of nerve, of compassion, of organs, of machinery, and of mind and body as a whole. Everything is in a process of decay, a town that has aged decades overnight and still carries traces of lives continuing just around the next corner or through the next door. It’s unclear if James himself is the ghost, walking through lives in process but failing to see them through the shadows of his own state.
/.../
I still can’t play certain sections without company – I am the world’s most cowardly horror fan – but the lasting sense is of sadness rather than spooks. Tragedy requires flaws and the game’s narrative of decay is built upon human failings of every kind. It’s a more sorrowful experience than a stack of melancholy ‘art games’.http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/12/silent-hill-2-review-pc/

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Cave! Cave! Deus Videt – Episode 0Who
would have thought, a game where you explore the paintings and the
secrets therein of artist Bosch? Both music and graphics are unique and
exciting. The narrative reminds me much of the works of Joestin Gaarder,
an old childhood favorite of mine. It's The Matrix and Alice in
Wonderland and Sophies World set in a world of intriguing history,
art, religion and the potential growth that comes with the alienation of youth.

Dog of Dracula: Barbecue Densetsu/Dog of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari
Wonderful
neo/cyberpunk noir pastiche which is both hillarously funny and
dead-serious as the same time. Despite its very short length, it managed to
draw me in and care about the world and its inhabitants which
left me wanting more, much more, and also to consider what video games
I've played gave me the most laughs (list below.

East van EP/Oracle (ceMelusine)
I
love the people behind Silverstring (ceMelusine is part of
Silverstring), because of Glitchhikers, and because of Azraels Stop.
This game wasn't as interesting, although more evocative than increpares
newest "let your mind fall to rest",
which too is a form of tarot-reading. Imagery is quite sublime, but
it's not something I'm prone to return to, nor give much thought in
retrospect, as opposed to the aforementioned games.

Niddhogg (Messhof)Played
it with a friend. Crazy, wicked fun I haven't had since Samurai Gunn!
Hopefully will be seeing much more of this. I hate to say this, but I
enjoyed it more than Johann Sebastian Joust (and I hate to say it beause I'm all for physicality in video games, alternative controllers and folk games).

Octodad: Dadliest CatchThe
second really funny game this week I played! Humor is a rarity when it
comes to video games, especially humor which isn't all scripted and
script, but comes from the interaction with the world. Seems like a
worthy successor to the original game. The coop is killer.

Rehearsals and ReturnsNow
when it's finally free to download, I gave it a spin. It is interesting
in the way that it feels compelling without having very much there to
begin with, but it probably could be realized better somehow. Even just
by letting people choose whom to interact with. Since the game is so
much about player input, it could have gone further yet and probably be
more cathartic for it.

Spelunky
Yeah.
So it came out on the PS4 and me and my friend thought we'd give it a
try. I can sort of image us sitting there, playing it a month from now,
cursing ourselves and the game. But honestly I just don't think it's for
me - too frustrating. But I do love cooperative video games and
although they seem to be all the rage right now, I still feel there is a
shortage on good ones.

Stopped playing: Wasteland 2.
Yes, the second part of the game is better. And yet, I started to grow
tired well before the second part, and now that I'm like 80% in, I'm
giving up for now. I'd give it a 7/10, probably 8 if I'm in a good mood,
which I'm not anymore since I feel it doesn't do the things it sets you
up to believe it will do. Well, some of that surely is my own fault,
but still - I'm tired of wanting to roleplay and act as if the things I
feel and do carry weight, only to realize that they indeed do not, and I
was a fool for thinking so. The only recourse then is to play a game
parallel to the video game in front of you, where the motivations of
your characters make sense. But try to mesh this world of fantasy in
your head with the one on the screen in front of you and the world of
your imagination gives way to the two-dimensional illusions of
programming. I get the choice to pick a character which has kids and I
can enter the age of this character, say 50+. Do the kids make any
appearance of any kind in the game? No. And people still call me
"youngster". Sure, I use this person to talk with people, because in my
mind this character is the leader of my ranger pack. But it doesn't make
any difference. Yeah, I can add more charisma to this character so that
they gain levels faster and thus become "more experienced" ("older")
than my other party members, but meh. A couple of levels of difference
after 50 hours?

I just wish I'd come across an RPG where after
playing it I wouldn't feel that I tried to give way too much credit to
its ambitions, expected way too much in terms of reactivity to the way I
play and feel and act and roleplay. There are other problems with
Wasteland, such as the fact that "choices" don't seem to matter, and I
don't only mean that in the way that there doesn't seem to be any
gravitas to ones interaction with the world (although that too is true,
since the characters aren't well-developed enough for me to care all
that much, basically the same problem I have with Bethesdas games and
the former Fallouts, although Fallout 1 & 2 made up for that with a
really mysterious, interesting and alive world and its open-ended system
of exploring it), but that many of the choices that you'd think matter
(do I choose repair mechanic or computer science) seem to come down
to... whatever. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for my
character which has perception as a skill, because it doesn't matter who
has perception as a skill, and because my character isn't changed by
being perceptive in any way, and me being perceptive barely matters for
other characters as well - mainly it gives me the opportunity to spot
more digging grounds where I can dig for buried scraps which means more
money. In the end it doesn't matter also because there is probably
another way of solving the problem in front of you, and it doesn't
matter which one you choose. Chances are you have both options available
in the party anyway, unless you want to roleplay and not game the
system by having each party members specializing in certain fields, but
then you'd just go back to playing that parallel game in your mind,
which at least I need some small input from the outside world (game
system) in order to stay interested in. If you don't have the skills in
the party, eh, just blow the wall up instead of kicking it down. It will
just cost you some money. In the end skills become cash. Everything
becomes cash. And loot. Loot everywhere. And the numbers don't add up,
either, seeing how I've maxed skills and still see the "impossible" icon
on chests and locks and whathaveyou, which according to the explanation
of how the skills are implemented in the game just doesn't make sense.
Sure, it's interesting that you can play "on the fly" and just roll with
the punches as superbunnyhop would have it, and fail at half the things
you try to do. But eventually I just stop caring due to everything
being random - contents of chests and such - and just feel that opening
stuff is a waste of my time.

I am disappointed. Planescape
seems to be a game about something else entirely, so I do hope Inexile
deliver on those promises (every combat encounter will count, etc) even
if they believe that what they did with Wasteland 2 was good for
Wasteland 2.

§Our design for Ice-Bound rejects both branching-path models of interactive story as well as overly simulationist approaches, targeting a middle-road aesthetic of sculptural construction that marries a focus on quality output with the player's exploration of both an emergent expressive space and an AR-enabled art book. http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_23.pdf

§

This paper introduces a new set of design-time visualizations for combinatorial interactive narrative authoring. By using these visualizations during thd creation of Ice-Bound (an interactive narrative iPad game) we were able to author content within a large combinatorial possibility space, and achieve both desired player freedom and content responsiveness http://fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_10.pdf

§

First up is combinatorial narrative, as we think this is the heart of what sets Ice-Bound apart from other story-games. It’s fairly complex, but we’re going to try and distill it down into something easily digestible.http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial_narrative/

§

Riffing on the dramatic concept of Chekhov’s gun, which states that everything introduced into a story should serve a narrative purpose, we’ve taken to calling our model “Chekhov’s dollhouse.” Do you put the spotlight on the gun over the mantelpiece, and bring it (and the violence it implies) into your story? Or do you put the focus somewhere else? Unlike branching path models, where making a choice is usually irreversible and high-consequence (even if the consequence is only wondering what you missed), with our model you can freely rearrange the story as much or little as you like before committing to a single configuration, as easily as rearranging the furniture in a dollhouse.http://ice-bound.com/news/combinatorial-narrative-part-two/

§

Conventional game design often denies players the act of interpretation./.../
I just want to raise the question as to why there isn’t a lot of interpretation going on in games. My hunch is because of the canonized idea of games mostly being composed of rules that need to be fairly communicated to the player, vagueness is discouraged.http://www.mattiebrice.com/further-thoughts-on-the-tarot-and-interpretation/

§

"You are Kickstarting Ice-Bound; an interactive piece of sculptural fiction and, uhm, what is sculptural fiction?"
"It's a term I've started using to describe a break away from the "branching path" model of interactive narrative. I also sometimes call this the "rat in a maze" model, because a) you can't usually see the big picture, b) often have no way of knowing what, if anything, you're missing when you make a choice, and c) it's usually difficult to go back and try again: you either have to restart from scratch, or laboriously retrace your steps. "Some of my recent projects, including Ice-Bound and 18 Cadence, are experiments towards a different approach: one where you can see the whole story at once, and make small, reversible decisions about its form, rather than big, high-consequence choices. The analogy is to the act of sculpting: iteratively making changes, large and small, until you arrive at something you're satisfied with. This is interesting to me because it pushes the player away from being an "actor" within a story, to something more like a "director" or "editor." I've always wanted my players to feel like they're collaborating with me in telling a story, and sculptural fiction is a move closer towards that ideal.http://indiegames.com/2014/10/aaron_a_reed_on_ice-bound_and_.html

§OTHER ARTICLES
Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to, for me at least, a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie. Before we can properly discuss the game, we need to talk some video game history and design theory. Over the past, there has been two different schools of horror games. One that has a horror wrapping on top of standardized gameplay (horror wrapping) and one that tries to recreate the happenings of a scary movie/novel (horror simulation). The former is quite well known and started with games like Lurking Horror (1987). Mechanically, the game played like other contemporary adventure games, but took place in a scary setting with events meant to frighten the player. The latter one is a bit harder to nail down precisely, but I would say it started out with a 3D Monster Maze (1982), a game that is neatly captured in its name: the player is trapped in maze and needs to escape a monster (in this case a heavily pixelated T-Rex).
/.../Just as the horror genre stagnated in the mid 2000s, because horror was merely a wrapping, the same might happen if we fail to move beyond "chased by monster" scenarios. While there is nothing wrong with these sort of games, I think it would be foolish to be satisfied with just that. There is so much more to explore in horror, and the success of recent horror simulators gives me hope that video games can handle it.http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2014/10/thoughts-on-alien-isolation-and-horror.html

§

Just as there are real contradictions to the exercise of sovereign exception, the use of such power within the rules of a video game, even one whose trademark is branching-path storytelling, remains a technical impossibility. Mass Effect seems to solve this problem by making the agency of Shepard rather illusory. As players, we are meant to feel that we share Shepard’s sovereign power, but the intrinsic contradictions of that power, mirrored by our subordination as consumers to the game design, give the Spectres a deeper, if more problematic, meaning.http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/blasto-sacer/

§

“The project that ended up on the shelves would never have been signed off by anyone up front,” Barlow says of the total overhaul of the classic Silent Hill formula. “It wasn’t like right back at the start we just pitched what became the game and everyone came on board. It very much just kind of meandered.”
/.../“The driving thing was exploring different ways of using interactivity,” Barlow says. “There’s so much data that games take on board about their player – we know where you are, what you’re looking at, how long you spend looking at things, what you’re doing – but 99 per cent of games don’t use any of that.”http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-silent-hill-shattered-memories/

§ARTICLESThe news that Mojang is to be sold to Microsoft undoubtedly causes a lot of upset for some. Minecraft, more cultural phenomenon than game at this point, has had a breadth of appeal unlike almost any other game. And Microsoft aren’t exactly at the top of most PC games player’s Christmas card lists. It’s very easy to see the news and immediately consider it bad news. But perhaps we should pause, and wonder if this might be something worth celebrating?http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/15/opinion-maybe-microsoft-buying-mojang-is-a-good-thing/

something I think Metal Gear Solid asks us to consider constantly: the very nature of interactivity means there is no fourth wall to break. A video game story necessarily exists in a world that includes the player, not just the character they control, and you can’t simply pretend they don’t exist.
/.../
Metal Gear has a reputation for extremely long sequences of passive acceptance as waves of chatter and floods of cutscenes wash over the player, but it is to be commended for proudly stating that the player is an important part of the puzzle. From the moment Colonel Campbell tells us about the Select button, the game is making a statement. You are not controlling Snake, you are Snake; and this universe only exists because you interact with it. The burden of the player’s role is exactly why games have the power to tell stories unlike anything you can find elsewhere.http://www.electricphantasms.com/self-awareness-interactivity-and-metal-gears-three-walls/